


The Winter of '88

by sauvignonfierce



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: College, Fluff, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-27
Updated: 2018-10-27
Packaged: 2019-08-08 12:47:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16429703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sauvignonfierce/pseuds/sauvignonfierce
Summary: After years in New York, their troubles in Hawkins begin to fade as they make their own slice of heaven.





	The Winter of '88

February, 1988

Steve could barely remember Hawkins sometimes. That sounded ridiculous, he said drunkenly one night at a party. He was crammed in a stairwell with a beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other talking to a girl with short hair and more ear piercings than he could count in his current state, and a boy who looked far too much like Billy Hargrove for his liking.

“So like, Indiana, man?” The guy asked, as if Steve would be lying. 

“Well, yeah. Where’d you grow up?” He asked, downing the rest of his beer and tossing the bottle into a trash can where it clanked noisily against the other empties. 

“Houston,” the boy replied, running a hand through his hair as if Houston was a point of pride. Music was filtering through the stairwell, tinny and far off. 

“What about you?” He asked the girl. Her dark lipstick was a little smudged. She fiddled with the cheap plastic jewelry hanging around her neck. 

“Boston,” she answered, sounding bored. 

“Oh cool. I have family there.” Steve tried to get the conversation interesting again. His mind was elsewhere though, thinking of the Hawkins streets and how foreign it all seemed. Sure, he’d been there a few months ago and over the past three years, he’d made plenty of trips back with Jonathan and Nancy but the feelings were fading. New York City took up so much of his mental space now. Even imagining the arcade back in Hawkins was hard. 

“Is that your girlfriend?” The girl asked, pointing to the door behind Steve. He turned around and say Nancy standing in the doorway.

“Yeah, nice meeting you guys,” he said, excusing himself. 

“Hey,” he said grinning at her, pulling her to him by her waist. She laughed and put her hands on either side of his face. Her eyes were shining and he could tell she was a little drunk. The redness of her cheeks made her look like a dream, something too good for this world. 

“Where’s our better third?” Steve asked her, kissing her cheeks lightly and crowding her against the door frame. 

“He’s been talking to Jessie about The Cure for like, 45 minutes,” she said. 

“Well, how do we get him out of that? Because I’ve been thinking about you two for at least an hour and I’m pretty sure I’m about to go insane,” he practically growled into her ear. She gripped his shoulders tighter.

“Let’s go find him, then.” She slid their fingers together and pulled him through the party. College had been good to them. They’d been able to explore themselves openly and freely during the two and a half years. A few people wore puzzled looks when they explained their relationship to them, but their friends didn’t care, and neither did the more alternative crowd. Jessie and Nancy had met in a chemistry class and when the ginger girl had let it slip that she was dating a girl, Nancy had grinned and told her all about Jonathan and Steve. They were close since then, and Jessie liked the two boys as well. 

“Jonathan,” Steve called, once they’d emerged on the other side of the tangle of sweaty bodies currently dancing to “Call Me” by Blondie in the living room of the apartment. 

Jonathan was huddled over a stack of albums while Jessie sat on the windowsill smoking, her worn out flannel fluttering in the wind. 

“One sec,” Jonathan muttered, flipping to find the album he was looking for. 

“You know your boy is insanely stubborn, right?” Jessie asked with a smile. 

“Oh we’re very aware,” Nancy said with a giggle. Steve sat down next to Jonathan on the floor as Nancy took the cigarette Jessie offered her and sat next to her on the window. Jessie’s eyes were on her girlfriend, who was almost out of sight in the crowd except for the flash of bleach blonde hair that bobbed to the beat of the song. Nancy’s eyes were glued to Steve and Jonathan. 

“AH! This is what I was talking about,” Jonathan said triumphantly. He shoved the record at Jessie, who scanned the notes on the back and nodded. 

“Okay it’s a great album but it’s just not as good as Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me,” Jessie stated as a fact. Jonathan groaned, ignoring Steve’s hand on his lower back. He could feel the other boy’s eyes on him as he argued animatedly with Jessie about how every track on Pornography was perfect. Nancy just watched, smiling widely, still feeling the effects on the numerous drinks she had imbibed through the night. 

“How about you both shut up and you Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me,” Steve said, pulling Jonathan towards him. Jonathan huffed out a chuckle but let Steve kiss him. Jessie rolled her eyes. 

“This does nothing for me. Don’t have sex on my bed,” she said sternly while hopping off the windowsill and wading into the group to find her girlfriend. 

“Pornography is a much better album,” Nancy agreed, nodding like a dutiful girlfriend and standing in front of her boyfriends. 

“Now let’s go home because I’m drunk and I want to do really ridiculous things to both of you.” Steve and Jonathan exchanged glances and scrambled up, using each other for balance. 

The walk home was freezing. Dirty slush soaked the streets, stained with grime and urine and garbage. The cold and the smells didn’t bother the three college juniors as they huddled together on the sidewalk, avoiding the sketchier allies in Greenwich village around NYU and the parks. They felt like pros at this point. They’d never take the subway past 10 pm. They’d heard so many horror stories of muggings and assaults it never felt worth it. Even if their feet aches and their book bags were too heavy, they’d make the trek to their third floor walk up before braving the graffiti littered underground tunnels. They may have been stupid kids sometimes, but they didn’t have a death wish. 

After spending the first year in the dorms, Jonathan and Steve sharing a room, with Nancy and her roommate in a neighboring dorm, they decided they didn’t want to try that again. It wasn’t too hard to find the time to slip away to the boys’ room, and Nancy soon found herself spending almost every night in one of the small beds with one of her boyfriends while the other slept across the room. It was manageable, but not ideal. The following summer in Hawkins, they all worked. Every spare hour was spent behind the counter of the arcade, the video store, the gas station. Wherever they could find work, they scrimped and saved every penny to get their new apartment. 

It was nothing special, a one bedroom on the fourth floor of a walk up with an oppressively small stairwell that always smelled like wet dog. But inside the apartment, they were home. They’d managed to get a great deal on a king sized mattress and a bed frame. It took up most of the bedroom, so they had bought the cheap couch from the previous tenants and Nancy spent a few weekends with a sewing machine given from her mom making an assortment of throw pillows. Jonathan and Steve were impressed with her mediocre sewing skills, which she had learned helping her mother make Mike’s Halloween costumes when he was young. 

Over the year and a half that they had lived there, they’d managed to make it into much more of a home than they’d first imagined. Pictures of their families and friends decorated the living room walls. Steve smiling and standing behind the group of now highschoolers, Nancy squeezing Mike protectively while he feigned annoyance, Jonathan and Will at a concert together. It was everything they loved, all in one place. Nancy always brushed her fingers over the framed picture of Barb in the front hallway when she came home. 

That night, drunk and numb from the cold, they huffed their way up the stairs and into their little sanctuary. It was warm inside, as the radiator buzzed quietly under the windowsill. 

“You still cold?” Jonathan asked Nancy after a few minutes, as she stood over the sink and guzzled a large glass of water. She shook her head. Her cheeks were flushed from the warmth of the apartment now. 

“No, I’m fine,” she said, holding out the glass to him. He took a few sips and passed it back, placing a kiss on her lips as he did so. She smiled against his mouth and pulled him closer. She felt Steve take the glass from her and set it down in the sink, one of his large warm hands coming to rest on her back, the other slipping under Jonathan’s shirt. 

“Jesus, your fingers are cold,” Jonathan said, startled at the feeling. 

“Well, we should do something to warm them up.” Steve grinned and started to walk towards their bedroom, peeling off his shirt as he did. Nancy and Jonathan barely had time to exchange a heated glance before they were scrambling after them. 

In the morning, things were peaceful. Sure, the sounds of sirens throughout the city, garbage trucks rumbling through the streets and the occasional burst of someone yelling were noticeable, but they were common place. The 80s hadn’t been kind to New York City, but in the cozy Lower East Side apartment where three 21 year olds were curled up in bed, it wasn’t a problem. Nancy always slept in the middle. It was never talked about, it was just how things unfolded. She would get hot in the middle of the night and have to push Steve off her so she could push the blankets down and cool off. In the summer, they slept with only sheets, that usually wound up kicked to the bottom of the bed. In the winter, they slept with a comforter that Steve always wound up with none of. But he took in Nancy’s warmth, curling around her from behind and using her as his own personal radiator. 

Jonathan loved to watch them sleep. Both of them were so angelic, with pink tinged chests and slightly open mouths. Steve’s eyelids always fluttered in the morning when he was in the staged of waking up. Nancy always woke suddenly, like she was being pulled from a dream. One second she was breathing steadily, the next her eyes flew open and she was awake. 

“I shouldn’t have drank so much,” Nancy said, eyes opening as suddenly as Jonathan knew they would. 

“You want breakfast?” Jonathan asked, stroking her warm face with the back of his hand. She shook her head, hair springy and unruly. 

“No, not yet. What time is it?” Jonathan craned his neck to see the alarm clock on Steve’s side of the bed. 

“9:30,” he said. “You can go back to sleep.”

“I’m awake now. Plus I have to do my chem reading,” she said, sighing heavily but not making a move to get out of bed. 

“Can you guys please shut up,” Steve groaned, covering his head with his arm. Nancy chuckled and turned over to face him.

“Aww, sorry Princess,” she said, leaning down to give him a kiss on the lips. He grumbled and burrowed deeper into the blankets. He was the worst of the three when it came to hangovers, something that amused the other two endlessly. 

“I’m going back to sleep,” he said, hiding his face in the pillow. He was almost completely covered up now, blankets creeping over his face. 

Jonathan jerked his head towards the kitchen and Nancy nodded. They slipped out of bed and settled down in the living room. The coffee pot was on and Nancy sprawled out on the couch. 

It was mornings like these, their minds still fuzzy from the night before, when everything smelled, tasted and felt like each other, that they all forgot about Hawkins just a little bit more. The evil that lived under their town, the trials they’d gone through to protect those they loved and lost, it all felt like a dream only a few years later. Nancy peeked through the door to watch Steve sleep, still buried by the soft down blankets. Jonathan hummed to himself as he poured coffee into two mugs. She sat back down on the couch and let everything that made her feel human soak in. These were the men she loved, and god knows, they loved her too. 


End file.
